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What are "Coloureds"? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa the answer will be "people of mixed race." This invocation of "mixing" inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of "tragic mulattoes"--long a trope in South African writing--in which the "products of miscegenation" can never be "true" South Africans. These were the views of apartheid's planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.[1]

Mohamed Adhikari's work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough--a slim volume of 187 pages--Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as "mixture," but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to "do away" with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book's main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa's 46.9 million people.[2] Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape, they, along with Africans--despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid--account for most of South Africa's urban and rural poor.

Renewed interest by academics and journalists in Coloured identity and politics was triggered by the results of the inaugural democratic elections in 1994.[3] In those elections, the votes of a plurality of Coloureds (alongside the majority of whites) ensured that the National Party (NP)--the party of apartheid--won the right to govern the Western Cape. The result also secured for the NP a prominent position in the first "government of national unity" with F. W. de Klerk as one of two deputy-presidents and prevented the African National Congress (ANC) from gaining a two-thirds electoral majority nationally.

But during the next two election cycles--1999 and 2004--the ANC first ousted the NP and then consolidated its hold over the Western Cape provincial government, with the help of Coloured voters. It might be true that lower turnout among Coloureds as well as an expanding African population in the province had much to do with the latter two election results. But growing support for the ANC among more rural-based Coloureds and the actions of a range of Coloured politicians who abandoned the NP for the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), also clearly had significant effects on the respective outcomes. That the NP would eventually disband in 2005 was also largely hastened by these developments.

Since then Coloured voters have been central to the resurgence of the increasingly right-wing DA (the DA is erroneously labeled as "liberal" in South Africa, a relic of its position relative to the NP within a very limited white public discourse under apartheid). While the DA is largely led by whites, Coloured support is central to its newfound dominance in controlling the more significant local government administrations (such as the Cape Town metropolitan city council) in the Western Cape.

Throughout this period most observers wondered why in contrast with other "races" in South Africa among whom post-apartheid voting patterns are more "stable," Coloured voting patterns are so unpredictable: For much of the twentieth century--when Coloured identity solidified--the most visible political organizations, either led by Coloureds or with significant Coloured membership or support, were either closely aligned or identified with broader black resistance. They are well covered by Adhikari. These included the African Political Organisation or APO (during the first half of the twentieth century), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union or ICWU (the 1920s and 1930s), Non-European Unity Movement (1940s), South African Coloured People's Organisation or SACPO (mid-1950s until it was banned in 1960), the Black Consciousness Movement (in its original incarnation in the 1970s), and the United Democratic Front or UDF (1983-1990).

Of these the APO, NEUM and SACPO were either exclusive to or dominated by Coloureds, the Black Consciousness Movement had a number of Coloureds in key leadership positions, and Coloured activists and communities were central to the formation of the UDF, the mainstay of anti-apartheid opposition in the 1980s in the absence of the long-banned ANC. Coloured communities were especially central to the success of the UDF's various rent and service boycotts and school disruptions. The largely Coloured textile worker base was also behind the growing worker militancy at the heart of the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1985. The ANC (and some observers) thus seemed justified in expecting overwhelming Coloured support for the organization in 1994.

One explanation for post-1994 Coloured political behavior lies in the different regimes of domination that the colonial and apartheid regimes maintained for its subject "races;" regimes that in turn highlighted and cemented differences in the way people experienced apartheid oppression or enjoyed degrees of "relative privilege." (The term "privilege" should be used cautiously, however; relative oppression might be more apt.)

In 1948, when the NP came into power on its electoral platform of Apartheid, it quickly introduced a slew of laws on residential segregation, classifying of the "races," employment, and education. For some Coloured elites it meant that the limited franchise rights they enjoyed (as a function of property ownership), were now abolished. The Group Areas Act that enforced residential segregation had profound effects on the city life of Coloureds. However, in contrast to Africans, Coloureds were never subject to the system of pass books, nor deported to "homelands." Significantly, the Western Cape was declared a "Coloured Labour Preference Area" meaning basically that in the absence of white job candidates, Coloureds would be considered to the exclusion of Africans.

In the wake of its "self-determination" policy (that introduced the "independent states" model for Africans in the 1960s), the NP government established a Coloured Representative Council in 1968. In the 1980s, the NP regime eager to maintain apartheid by other means, worked with some success to co-opt more moderate Coloured leaders (mainly clergy, traders and teachers) to legitimize its 1983 "Constitutional reforms" (alongside its ever-expanding security state). These reforms established separate "houses of parliament" for whites, Coloureds, and Indians. Whites would retain control over "national" affairs such as defense, finance and foreign policy, while Coloureds (and Indians) would retain "control" over "own affairs" such as education, health, and social welfare. However, whites could override any decisions of the two other houses even on the latter set of issues. Africans were excluded from these reforms.

The reforms were rejected by the majority of Coloureds and "Coloured elections" for the House of Representatives (as the Coloured chamber was named), drew average polls of less than 20 percent of registered voters in 1983 and in 1989. But significantly, Coloured organizations that emerged in the wake of the reforms provided a crucial basis for the later political organization in Coloured areas by the NP.

A second explanation for recent Coloured political behavior and identity traces it to the transition of the early 1990s, a period that would witness the fundamental reordering of South Africa's political landscape. Then the major political actors--both the ANC and the NP--openly courted Coloureds as Coloureds; not as so-called Coloureds. (For a long time being Coloured was associated with stigma both by whites and blacks, including Coloureds themselves, hence the prefix "so-called").

The NP, led by an invigorated De Klerk (soon to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) and aided by white commentators in the media, began to play up the supposed close affinity of whites (especially Afrikaners) with Coloureds. This was of course totally at odds with the public ideology and policies of the NP for much of the preceding fifty years. But it proved effective nonetheless as De Klerk "apologized" for apartheid and the NP emphasized its Christian roots, something that played well with a large section of the Coloured community. Finally, the NP also played on fears that working-class Coloureds had of competition from Africans for dwindling resources.

The ANC, in the wake of its unbanning, also tried "Coloured politics," but with less success. Mandela famously publicly re-introduced the idea of "four races" (at the center of antiapartheid politics in the 1950s) and of "Coloured ethnicity" into the ANC's lexicon. As Adhikari reports, around the same time, however, Winnie Mandela, still then a very senior figure in the organization, commented that Coloured people are the result of white men raping black women (p. 28). The NP and conservative Coloured leaders pounced on this gaffe as a sign of the ANC's insincerity to Coloureds, and ANC activists had a hard time defending the outburst. More generally the ANC appeared either unable to counter the NP's very effective propaganda or unaware of its importance.

Despite the evident power of these top-down explanations, Adhikari's study of Coloured identity tries to show them insufficient to make sense of Coloured racial and political identity both under apartheid and particularly since 1994. A former high-school teacher (he taught in the Bonteheuwel Coloured township on the Cape Flats in the 1970s), Adhikari spent his recent work-life affiliated to the University of Cape Town. Currently he is an associate professor in historical studies at that university. The bulk of his research and publishing has revolved around documenting the history of progressive, mainly anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Coloured politics in the first half of the twentieth century in Cape Town, and includes studies of the APO and its leader Abdullah Abdurahman, along with the Teacher's League of South Africa (TLSA) and the NEUM.

The central thesis of the present book is that Coloured political identity must be understood in light of four "enduring characteristics rooted in the historical experience and social situation of the Coloured community that regulated the way Colouredness functioned as a social identity under white domination." These include an assimilationist tendency, with the goal of acceptance into the dominant society; the intermediate status of Coloureds in the racial hierarchy, which raised fears that that they might "lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans"; the shame associated with "mixed" origins; and finally, political marginalization, "which caused them a great deal of frustration." For Adhikari, Coloureds' marginal status is the most important of these attributes "as it placed severe limitations on possibilities for social and political action" (p. xii).

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough consists of four sets of case studies, prefaced by a review of writing by Coloureds that is supposed to represent "the entire historical spectrum of opinion" (p. 64). Adhikari classifies these works into three broad categories or "contending historiographical paradigms." The first of these is the "essentialist school" that associates Coloured identity with miscegenation going back to the earliest days of European settlement. This is an inherently racialized approach, assigning racial origins and characteristics to Colouredness. Much of popular writing and earlier academic writing is cast in this mold. The second approach to Colouredness is "instrumentalist." Broadly, this tendency regards Coloured identity as artificial, imposed by the white state in a deliberate attempt to divide and rule the black majority.

A third approach is "social constructionism," with which, not surprisingly, Adhikari identifies himself. Emerging in the 1980s as a response to the first two "paradigms," social constructionism "criticizes both these approaches for their tendency to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as fixed." In reifying identity, Adhikari argues, the first two approaches fail to "recognize fluidities in processes of coloured self-identification or ambiguities in the expression of the identity." Essentialists are blinded by their Eurocentrism and/or racism, while instrumentalists narrowly focus on Coloured protest politics in a way that exaggerates "the resistance of coloured people to white supremacism and plays down their accommodation with the South African racial system." According to Adhikari, "the overall result has been an oversimplification of the phenomenon [of coloured identity]" (p. 35).

Adhikari reviews the small body of book-length studies of Coloured identity produced by Coloureds between 1936 (when two Coloured teachers, Dorothy Viljoen and Christian Viljoen, published a history textbook, The Student Teacher's History Course: For the Use in Coloured Training Colleges) and 1994 (when Roy de Pre, a historian then based at the University of Transkei, published his Separate, But Unequal: The Coloured People of South Africa_). For Adhikari, all these books exhibit traces of both essentialist and instrumental understandings of Colouredness.

To contrast this "oversimplification," Adhikari constructs his own account based on the journalistic and literary production by Coloureds in the twentieth century. He begins with a combined study of the APO Newsletter (started in 1902) and the Education Journal, the publication of the TLSA. Neither organization organized for broader black political demands, instead insisting on working for Coloured demands only, at the same time reflecting and fostered an acceptance of the racial order among the Coloured petty bourgeoisie.

Next comes the Torch newspaper published by the NEUM between 1943 and 1963 and the writings of the novelist and ANC political activist Alex La Guma (basically a close reading of his novel A Walk in the Night [1962]). These are examined as examples of the main Communist and Trotskyist strands of the "radical movement" among Coloureds in the mid-20th century. This is followed by a textual analysis of on the one hand, the work of the Cape Town poet and publisher James Matthews, a fairly prominent figure in the black consciousness movement during the 1970s and the popular resistance of the 1980s, and on the other, the "alternative" newspapers Grassroots and South, published in Cape Town throughout the 1980s until 1994 by a mainly Coloured and UDF-affiliated editorial staff.

While all of these individuals and publications explicitly rejected Coloured identity and racial categories more generally, Adhikari argues that they, too, share essentialist assumptions. For him, this illustrates an essential "stability" of Coloured identity in the twentieth century.

The final chapter is an evaluation of the post-apartheid period. This contains probably the most interesting parts of the book as not much useful work has been written by academics about Coloured identity after apartheid. Adhikari lists some of the movements and tendencies that have emerged since 1994--from the right-wing Coloured Liberation Movement, a Khoisan "Revivalist" Movement (whose members premise their claims for rights on a primordial link to the first inhabitants of modern-day South Africa) to the ANC-derived December First Movement, among others.

This book has much going for it. Its "counterintuitive argument" that Coloured identity was stable (rather than evolved gradually over time or changed abruptly) is not original (it is a common refrain among some activists and political operatives), but is certainly bold as a scholarly argument. So is Adhikari's use of a range of texts and approaches from content analysis and literary approaches. The same can be said for the book's broad historical sweep--an approach absent in most studies of identity in South Africa.

However, the easy categorizations into which he slots Coloured writing and writing on Colouredness may be due at least in part to a bias in his selection of texts to examine. For example, it is not entirely clear what Adhikari wanted to achieve with his review of "historical writing." For one, judging a teacher's training manual, partisan newsletters and pamphlets, novels as well as a smattering of mostly obscure monographs, by a seemingly narrow set of historical criteria seems odd. Also, this reader at least, remains unconvinced that these texts represent the "entire ideological spectrum of opinion within the coloured community on the nature of coloured identity," or even a representative sample. For example, one of the texts he cites, a political science dissertation published in Canada by expatriate Maurice Hommel, was certainly never widely available inside or outside South Africa and as such could not have much impact on debates about Coloured identity and politics.

Adhikari's literature review also omits some important works, most notably Vernon February's incisive study of Afrikaans literature and Coloureds, Mind Your Colour: The Coloured Stereotype in South African Literature (1981).

With the exception of the APO Newsletter, and the more recent Grassroots and South, the bulk of Adhikari's case studies are about publications and individuals, whose work--despite its wide reach among elites and outside the country--were in fact very marginal to what Adhikari is concerned with here: Coloured public discourse (if such a public sphere can be said to exist).

Harassed and hounded by the apartheid regime, Alex La Guma, for example, spent the bulk of his most productive years in enforced exile outside South Africa--apart from his vocation as a writer, he was longtime ANC representative in the Caribbean. His writings were banned inside the country, and as a result were neither easily attainable nor widely read, even less so among Coloured elites. In fact, as Adhikari's discussion of La Guma demonstrates, his work had a much greater international impact as a "third world" or continental writer and intellectual. Similarly James Matthews, a more popular figure than La Guma inside South Africa, had a more limited impact among Coloureds than Adhikari would want us believe. In Matthews' case, talent did not necessarily translate into influence. When poetry reached that genre's most popular phase (at political rallies in the 1980s), Matthews was already winding down his career. Matthews' work enjoyed a brief revival after apartheid, but cannot necessarily be treated as representative.

Adhikari, to his detriment, focuses mainly on intellectual work done in English and Coloured communities based in the Western Cape. This may hold for intellectual life before the Second World War, but is less convincing for the period after 1960, when writers such as S. V. Peterson, P. J. Philander and Adam Small, writing mainly in Afrikaans, had a much larger impact on popular Coloured consciousness and intellectual politics than either La Guma or Matthews could ever achieve, and which receives no attention from Adhikari. (February covered this ground excellently in his book Mind Your Colour.)

A poet and playwright, Small was one of the first black faculty members of the University of the Western Cape, where he taught first philosophy and later social work. In both his written work--written in the Afrikaans spoken in working-class Coloured neighborhoods in Cape Town (what Small coined "Kaaps")--and political activism, he maintained an ambiguous relationship to both the official Afrikaans literature establishment and the black consciousness movement. The important thing to note about Small is that because his work was prescribed in Coloured schools, his opinions appeared in newspapers, and his plays (which explicitly dealt with Coloured identity and politics) were widely performed in venues in the townships, he had significant impact on political ideas and consciousness among Coloureds.[4]

Similarly, no mention is made of the "Alternatiewe Afrikaans" movement of a younger generation of Coloured language teachers and writer-activists (as distinct from the cultural movement among young white Afrikaners in the mid-1980s), who in the wake of the 1976 student uprising (caused directly by the state's policy to enforce Afrikaans as a language of instruction in African schools) sought to divorce their first language from its association with the oppressor,[5] but also to present new interpretations of Coloured identity and history.[6] This line of thinking had wide resonance in the fairly moderate Cape Teacher's Professional Organisation (that had replaced the TLSA as the premier organization of Coloured teachers) led by Franklin Sonn (later the first black ambassador of South Africa to the United States) or the later, more outspokenly ANC-orientated South African Democratic Teachers' Union (through its leader Randall van den Heever, a school principal in Cape Town and later ANC member of Parliament). The Alternatiewe Afrikaans movement had a major impact on the teaching of Afrikaans in Coloured schools, particularly in the Western Cape (p. 7). Alongside this group one could also mention the establishment and success of the Swart Afrikaanse Skrywersvereniging (the Black Afrikaans Writers' Association), led by writers with links to popular movements and trade unions such as Leonard Koza and the late Patrick Peterson in the late 1980s .

Also given short shrift is the impact of religious institutions in forming political identity among Coloureds. Along with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, with its overt opposition to apartheid, the Dutch Reform Mission Church ("the Sendingkerk") had considerable influence among Coloureds, maintaining high membership levels among Coloureds throughout apartheid and after. What impact the "Sendingkerk," or other more conservative churches such as the growing evangelical movement or the Apostolic sect had on Coloured identity still needs to be explored by scholars.

Adhikari includes case studies of newspapers, but by any criteria all the newspapers or newsletters that he cites (with the exception of the APO Newsletter) were hardly at the center of Coloured political life. There is no substantive discussion of newspapers with a bigger impact under apartheid such as the Cape Herald published by the Argus Group (at the time, part of the mining corporation Anglo-American) or the Afrikaans-language Rapport-Ekstra and Die Burger-Ekstra, published as racially exclusive editions by the Nasionale Pers group, which were closely allied to the National Party.

Both these sets of newspapers, despite their compromised ownership, were widely read by Coloureds since the 1970s, much more than the newspapers Adhikari focuses on. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the main (whites-only) editorial and news sections of Rapport or Die Burger covered white news and its editors supported extreme segregation or the policies of successive NP governments, while at the same time the separate edition for Coloureds often reflected various positions of left (including the leading Charterist and Trotskyist opposition to apartheid) opposition groups.

Moreover, a strange logic underlies Adhikari's assessment of the APO Newsletter through to the newspapers South and Grassroots as well as what he considers the leading Coloured intellectuals of that time. Adhikari works with the idea that confronting racism as a Coloured in a social setting that demands, even more so forces you to do so, is in some ways an acceptance of a conservative Coloured identity and therefore of the South African racial hierarchy. So for example, when discussing La Guma he claims that because La Guma "appealed to people's identity as Coloured to mobilize resistance to apartheid and had no qualms about being an officer of an organization, SACPO, that explicitly identified itself as Coloured," there can be little doubt that La Guma identified himself as Coloured and "accepted Coloured identity as given" (p. 123). Apart from being an oversimplified view of La Guma's politics, there is no clear evidence for this charge--in fact Adhikari writes in the same section that "this is never made explicit in A Walk in the Night." We just have to trust Adhikari's judgment. Similarly, in the case of the news weekly South, he argues that because the newspaper's founders claimed their main objective was "to articulate the needs and aspirations of the oppressed and exploited in the Cape and in so doing serve the interests of the working-class people," there was therefore "no question of South identifying itself as a Coloured newspaper or following a narrowly racial agenda" (p. 150). He writes about James Matthews in the same vein.

Before World War Two Coloured political life, with few exceptions, was largely limited to a few "elite" families, schools, trade unions, teacher training colleges and neighborhoods around the center of Cape Town. This is the terrain that is covered well by Adhikari for the first half of this book and in his previous work. But that pre-eminence ended after the mid-1950s and early 1960s. As a result of a number of factors, migration, urbanization, greater access to education, and political factors as diverse as the emergence of Black Consciousness and the establishment of the Coloured Representative Council, resulted in Coloured intellectual and identity politics--up to then highly centralized--becoming more dispersed and reorganized in the process.

In the aftermath of the state's clampdown on popular movements and intellectual and resistance political culture in the mid- to late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the movements associated with Coloured political action were decimated with activists forced into exile, house arrest, or either intimidated or simply discouraged enough to leave politics behind. New faces and organizations emerged often to take their place, with the result of multiple centers of Coloured identity formation over time.

So for example, much of the impetus for the reactionary politics of the Labour Party that entered the Tricameral Parliament in 1983 came from politicians and leaders based in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng. Resistance politics in the Western Cape came increasingly from the "Cape Flats," to where most Coloureds were forcefully removed from the mid-1950s onwards. On the flats, "rejectionism" had to vie with radical youth politics, either closely allied to the remnants of the Trotskyists and the black consciousness movement on the one hand, or on the other hand the ANC's internal ally, the UDF.

Since the early 1970s Coloured resistance politics and intellectualism came from mainly Afrikaans-speaking, formerly rural Coloureds who had come to Cape Town for education--among them university students and professors--as well as unionists allied to the Congress of South African Trade Unions. These people's politics were not always explicitly Coloured nor did they necessarily revolve around Coloured identity, but they were deeply concerned with the social, economic, and political conditions of this part of the population. (They include people such as Jakes Gerwel, at the time an Afrikaans professor and later president of the University of the Western Cape; Allan Boesak, a leading cleric; the trade unionist Johnny Issel, and the activist-intellectuals of the Call of Islam).

Finally, in writing of more recent political events and the present, Adhikari rightly points to the fact that the UDF's relationship to Coloured people has been romanticized, but he does not offer an alternative account. He does not engage with the utterances or writings of those figures who were at the initially doomed foray into the tricameral parliament, but who because of clever politics would become central to post-apartheid power politics in the Western Cape and elsewhere after apartheid. These include Peter Marais, who served both as Premier of the Western Cape and later as Mayor of Cape Town. The same goes nationally for Allan Hendrickse, who would in a long political life, be associated with both the black consciousness movement and later with the recently deceased apartheid dictator P. W. Botha. On the one hand, he was at the lead of the Labour Party as it made compromises with the NP government, while later he would broker the Labour Party's partial restoration under the ANC. Also problematic is the fact that many of the organizations Adhikari writes about--the December the First Movement or the Khoisan Resistance Movement--had more or less disintegrated at least four years before the book's 2003 publication date. Which is perhaps why--oddly, given the emphasis on "stability" throughout the book--Adhikari argues on the last two pages of the book that Coloured identity is characterized by "fragmentation, uncertainty, and confusion" (p. 186), "remain[ing] in flux" as well as "experiencing a degree of change unparalleled since its emergence in the late nineteenth century" (p. 187).

Notes

[1]. See Gomolemo Mokae, Robert McBride: A Coloured Life (South Africa History Online and Vista University, 2004). In the foreword to this biography of a leading African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla and former death-row inmate, the newspaper columnist Sipho Seepe wrote: "Would the so-called Coloured people ever find an accommodation in South Africa?" Seepe followed the book's author, Gomolemo Mokae (at one time a leading Black Consciousness activist under apartheid), who later speculates that McBride's decision to join the ANC's military wing and some of his subsequent political choices were for the most part influenced by his desire "to be blacker than black."

[2]. According to the official statistical service, Statistics South Africa (see South African Yearbook 2006, p. 2). The yearbook also reports that according to the last official census in 2003, Coloureds make up 8.9 percent of South Africa's 44.8 million people.

[3]. Some of the more lasting works on Coloured identity, apart from the ones referenced in this review, include Ian Goldin, The Politics and Economics of Making Coloured Identity in South Africa (London: Longman, 1987); Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African "Coloured" Politics (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987); and Zoe Wicomb, "Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa" in Writing South Africa, ed. David Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). More recently published is Zimitri Erasmus, ed., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town: Kwela Books; South African History Online, 2001).